August 8-16, 2009

We left Virginia and traveled north to New Jersey. We spent a lovely evening and day with Coleen’s cousin Sandy & Frank. We hadn’t seen them for over a year and it was great to spend some time visiting with them. They graciously opened their home to us for the night. We worshiped with them at their church on Sunday morning. Coleen even visited 2 quilt shops with Sandy. Bob went with Frank to see the remodeling on Kathy & Garrett’s house. Kathy, Garrett and Alisa stopped in to see us Saturday night.

We left New Jersey early Sunday evening and drove to Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, Pennsylvania. We moved into a nice two bedroom condo. There were two floors with bedrooms up and a very nice screened porch. Monday we got our bearings and did some planning for the week. Tuesday Bob took the van to get and oil change. We then went to the outlet mall and found some really good bargains on some clothes. We stopped at the grocery and arrived back at the condo about 7 p.m. just in time to see a black bear tipping over the garbage cans in the parking lot. We guessed that the bear was about a year old but it sure knew what to do. We also saw a skunk walking around the parking lot of the recreation center.

We went to the Delaware Water Gap National Park at Dingmans Falls. We walked to see them and also passed by Silverthread Falls. We spent another day driving to the Upper Delaware Gap National Park. We stopped at the Roebling Delaware Aqueduct. It brought back memories of our canal trip in June. It is a road now but used to be a canal over the river. We stopped at Grey Towers which is a National Historic Site operated in Milford, PA. It was the summer home of the Gifford Pinchot family who was governor of Pennsylvania twice and was instrumental in starting the forest service.


Next was the Zane Grey Museum in Lackawaxen right on the Delaware River.

The last stop of the day was the Steamtown National Historic Park in Scranton.





It brought back memories of the Durango steam trains. The roundhouse, turntable and yard have been restored and there is an excellent museum. We went through a caboose,

box car,
sleeping car and then the mail car.


We got back to the condo just in time to see the 3 raccoon run under our porch.

As we returned from our Saturday morning walk we enjoyed another visit from a bear. This was a larger one and she also came back a second time about a half hour later. She just pushed the entire bin over so that the trash cans inside dump out and then she rifled through the garbage. We decided that this was our wild animal week.

We left on Sunday for Hancock, Massachusetts. On the way we stopped in Kinderhook, New York at Martin Van Buren Historic Site to see Lindenwald. Since we are seeing so many historic items I found a book called Presidents for Dummies and purchased it to see what we might learn in a short amount of time.